Konstantin Soukhovetski scores another triumph in Durban within the space of a week. (Review by Michael Green)Two late romantic composers drew a bigger than usual audience to the Durban City Hall for this concert given by the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Highbrows are sometimes patronising about the music of Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943) and Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), but there is no denying the power and magnetic appeal of the music of these two masters from Russia and Finland.
There were just two items on the programme, two long compositions: Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 3 in D minor and Sibelius’s Symphony No 2 in D major. The orchestra was under the direction of the Israeli conductor Omri Hadari, visiting Durban for the 23rd year and as vigorous and vital as ever. The players responded admirably and gave splendid performances of both works.
The evening belonged, however, to the soloist in the Rachmaninov, the 29-year-old pianist Konstantin Soukhovetski, born and bred in Moscow but resident in the United States for the past 11 years. Two days earlier, he had delighted a Friends of Music audience with his skill and artistry in a piano recital. Playing the Rachmaninov concerto he scored another triumph in a work that is generally regarded as one of the most difficult in the entire piano repertory.
Listening to this music, so complex and yet so lyrical, it is difficult to believe that more than a hundred years have elapsed since Rachmaninov himself gave the first performance of it, in New York in 1909. Konstantin Soukhovetski gave a brilliant account. There was nothing lacking on the technical side, but I liked best his playing of the exquisite cantabile passages, so Russian, so melancholy, so poignant, so Rachmaninov. The concerto ends with pianistic pyrotechnics, played with such energy that the soloist almost threw himself off his piano stool with his final flourish. The applause was rapturous, with cries of Bravo, and it was well earned. - Michael Green
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